A Different Kind of Pick

Sick in bed today, Maurice Sendak has been on my mind. An eight-essay tribute in one of my husband’s academic journals (as bland, irritating and self-congratulatory as it sounds) led me to Spike Jonze’s pretty incredible documentary, Tell Them Anything You Want, and so on to this thought: that anyone who creates things as their vocation will always be “defined”—largely incorrectly—both by people who do and do not know them; and this is what makes it so vastly important to hold on to your own ideas, opinions, grand thoughts (and contradictions, I forgot to mention the first time around), the weirder and more controversial the better. Jonze’s film probably isn’t appropriate for children, but in tribute to MS himself, who is often quoted as saying that we should always tell children the truth, I will watch it again later with my daughter.